by Weston Ochse
A sob bubbled near his heart. He swallowed it, unwilling to reveal the emotion. Still, his eyes brimmed with tears until the image was smeared in his vision. He’d never seen anything as beautiful. And to think that it belonged to him.
“Where’s your camera?” she asked.
“What?”
“Your camera. You said you had to take a picture beside the award for the scavenger hunt.”
He felt at his pockets, then patted his jacket. He grinned sheepishly. “I seem to have forgotten it.”
“Oh, I see.” She smiled softly, as if she’d never really believed his story. “What shall we do then?”
He sighed, looked once more at the picture, then allowed a trembling hand touch the black lacquered frame. “Maybe if it’s not too much trouble, I can come back another time for the picture.” He turned and looked into her eyes.
She gazed back at him, and their eyes locked like a handshake. She finally responded, “I think that would be nice.”
He wanted to say thank you, but his mouth wouldn’t work. Instead, he nodded and showed himself out. Blockbuster honored the silence and didn’t say a word until they were almost back to San Pedro.
“Did you find what you were looking for?” he asked.
Bobby nodded and stared through the window at the passing cars. Night had fallen, and the red and white lights blurred through the tears in his vision. He had some business to take care of, but when he was done, he vowed that he’d return to Malibu. He felt a connection with the woman, something more than just his father’s award.
His father’s award... he liked the sound of that.
The existence of the award at the end of Verdina’s trail proved that it had come from the Memphis orphanage, and if that was true, then the contents of the letter were true, which meant that Elvis was, indeed, his father.
Bobby thought the information would hit him like a blow, or perhaps arrive with an angelic chorus, but instead the knowledge was more like a warm feeling of satisfaction, much like he’d felt with Laurie and Kanga, and sometimes with Lucy. The feeling was one of belonging. If this was what it felt like to have a family, he understood why the convention was so popular.
How about that?
He smiled.
He had a father.
Not that anyone would ever know, but it meant the world to Bobby Dupree.
Chapter 26
The easiest way to destroy a monster is by removing its head. Such was Lucy’s idea to divest him of his problem with Shrewsbury. Either he’d convince the man to move along, or send his soul to the halfway house. He wasn’t going to stand for it.
His father had been moved to Sinai downtown, where Salvadorans of any shape or size would be as out of place as a rat at a wedding. The place was so high rent that even the cops drove Lexus vehicles. Funny how his dad would be safe by hiding him with the rich folk. When he came down off his high, he’d laugh at the whole thing. At least that’s what Lucy convinced himself. For now, he needed his father out of the way and in a safe place so they could start a war.
With the exception of Blockbuster, who was taking Bobby to Malibu, and Trujillo, who was held back in Pedro with six trusted Angels, they were traveling in force. Seventeen lowriders rumbled along Western Avenue toward Portuguese Bend. They were led by Mojo’s 1973 Chevy Caprice with gull wing doors, the car hopping and dancing like a court jester announcing their procession. Behind this came Impalas, Cadillac Broughams, a purple Oldsmobile 88, a completely chrome El Camino, and a new Titan pickup with mermaids splashing across the sides—all of them snapping, popping, and cruising mere inches from the earth.
These augmented machines were the mechanical version of a bebop, brown pride strutting along on four wheels, sometimes three, and once in a while even two. The duality of a stately procession and flamboyant displays of mechanical machismo fit perfectly into the Angel attitude. There would be no sneaking up on the enemy. They’d come at it with as much pomp and circumstance as was possible. This trip up the hill with the Angels and their cars was like a prize fighter’s jaunt to the ring. They passed homes with clapping children on the porches. Wind blew leaves from the trees like nature’s confetti. Entire families rose from their picnics at Point Fermin to run to the curb and applaud them.
Lucy and the 8th Street Angels were the people’s champion. They were the Rocky Balboa of Los Angeles, grown from the streets, heart of the neighborhood. The city was part of their genetic makeup.
Lucy rode midway in the line of cars, driving a 1948 Chevy Fleetline Bomb. Cherry red, the chrome grill snarled at the asphalt. Matching chrome fenders and wheel wing strips sluiced the air. Atop the mountainous hood stood an angel polished to blinding perfection, wings outstretched, face pointed to the sun. Lucy sat on the red leather and white bench seat, gripping the thin wheel in both hands.
They couldn’t be stopped.
They had to win.
Right was on their side.
But the police weren’t.
They heard the sirens before they saw the dozen cars that had pulled across the road. Cops rested shotguns across blue and white hoods forming a double-ought barrier. Others held pistols at eye level. Straight out of a movie, Lucy couldn’t hide the desire to run them down and check his chances. But this wasn’t a movie. This was real life.
His inability to do anything suddenly came crashing home. No longer was he the gang leader. No longer was he the toughest guy in the neighborhood. His father was in the hospital. Split was dead, as were many others, and he could see no end to it.
The cars stopped in line, engines revving, front ends rising like bulls ready to lower their heads and charge.
“Lucy,” came Mojo’s voice through the phone.
The irony of the police protecting a porn movie director with pedophile connections who was responsible for all the recent violence in San Pedro wasn’t lost on Lucy. No matter how he argued with them, no matter how he explained he was trying to protect his city, at the end of the day he was just another brown-skinned nigger not worthy of going up the hill.
“Lucy? What should we do?”
He remembered a scene in a movie he’d once seen. The movie had been The Devil’s Rejects and was about a family of murderers. Ultraviolent, the movie ended with the three murderers facing off against a line of police cars blocking the road. Broken and bloodied, shot through and cut to ribbons, the family decided to charge the police as a demonstration of the will to live and their rage against being held back.
“Lucy? I swear they’re locking and loading. I’ll run them down if you want me too.” Mojo’s voice hardened as he said those last words.
Is that what Lucy wanted? It sure would be an easy way out. Then he thought of his abuela and what she’d told him when he was a child the first time he’d got his ass beat by a bigger kid.
“You wanna cry, then go cry, but crying ain’t gonna make that boy stop hitting you.”
“But he’s bigger than me.”
“Then hit him harder.”
“What if I’m afraid?”
“Then leave this house now. I won’t have anyone afraid in my family.”
The idea that he’d be thrown out of his home and be denied his grandma’s love shattered his childhood innocence like nothing else could. From that moment on he’d made a choice to love his grandma, even if that meant violence. She’d grown up on hard times and believed in the virtues of a hard life. She didn’t see it as bad or evil. She saw it as survival. He’d gone out the next morning and surprised the bigger kid at the bus stop by hitting him over the head with a brick. As he’d stood above the crying boy who was cradling his bleeding head, Lucy felt no fear, and he liked the feeling. So why was he afraid now?
“Fuck it, Lucy. I’m going to run the putos down!”
“No, Mojo,” Lucy whispered. Then louder, “No!”
“What’d you say?”
“I said stand down. Everyone, we’re going home.”
Exclamations of surprise erupted
all up and down the line. It was clear that they didn’t like it, but the Angels followed his command. A once orderly, stately procession, devolved into a parking lot as cars backed up and struggled to turn around on a narrow San Pedro street. The police made no move to stop them. They weren’t out to arrest anyone. They were merely there to keep Lucy from doing what he should have been allowed to do.
The Angels asked him repeatedly what they were going to do now. They begged Lucy to answer, to say anything. But he kept silent. He was keeping his own counsel at the moment. The truth was, he didn’t know what to say.
When the others left, he stayed and spoke with Captain Feisler for a while. He didn’t hide his desire to exact his own angelic brand of retribution. She commiserated, but pointed out that L.A.’s finest couldn’t be party to such a thing. Protect and serve included everyone and they were all innocent until proven guilty. But she did tell him she’d look into Shrewsbury’s connections. She’d get a search warrant in the morning, and if there was anything at his home to incriminate him, she’d haul his ass downtown. By her demeanor, Lucy believed that she would do it, too.
He arrived home an hour later. He parked the Fleetline in the garage. Julio played dominoes by himself on the porch. He looked up as Lucy passed. They exchanged a nod.
Lucy’s abuela was in the kitchen ironing the neighbor’s laundry like she always did. They paid her two dollars a bag as they had done for twenty years. What the old woman did with her money, Lucy didn’t know. It didn’t matter. As long as she lived in this house, which had been for Lucy’s whole life, she’d want for nothing.
She glanced up as he entered and watched with a miserable glare as he went to the fridge, grabbed a beer, popped the top, then took a long swig. When he raised his eyes as if to ask what, she merely tskked and returned to her ironing, her attention dedicated to the neighbor longshoreman’s dark blue cotton slacks.
He grabbed a chair and sat and watched her. The domestic scene helped still the snakes in his brain. So much was going on, he barely felt in control. Trujillo was checking with his connections in Compton, trying to get a handle on the next attack. They’d been caught flatfooted last time and had severely underestimated the Salvadorans’ abilities.
Not again.
Never again.
“Did that boy find Elvis?”
“I don’t know.” That was a good question. He hadn’t heard from Bobby or his Angel all day. He’d sent Blockbuster with the kid for more reasons than just to keep the boy company. Manolo had found out that Blockbuster had a Salvadoran uncle. Why Lucy hadn’t been told this fact, he didn’t know, but he felt something amiss in his gut, and his gut was rarely wrong.
“What happens when he finds his Elvis?”
“Good question.” He remembered what Bobby had said.
“The idea of belonging. Seems that everyone else had people to belong to. I never had that. If Elvis does turn out to be my father, I can at least know that I had a family out there. Every time I hear a song or see a picture or watch a movie I would remember that he was my father. I don’t know. Just the idea of that seems special to me.”
“Belonging is important,” she said.
He grinned quickly and shook his head. Like she did so many times, she’d seemed to read his mind. He got another beer and tossed the empty in a box, then sat down to hear her out.
“With belonging comes ownership. You know that with your dear Angels.” She gave him a look that meant he better listen. “You made them and they belong to you. And now you want to protect them, keep them safe. That’s only right. It’s what your father wanted. It’s what I wanted. This belonging is all over the place.”
“Not such a bad thing.”
“You say that now, but it can be taken too far.”
“I don’t know. I love the Angels and I love San Pedro. I feel it when a business goes under. I feel it when someone’s home burns down. Sometimes it’s almost physical.” He touched the left side of his chest above the heart. “It hurts here.”
“You love this place. There was once one who loved like you.” Abuela spat between two fingers and crossed herself. “No. I shouldn’t have compared you. That’s bad luck.” She spat three times on the shirt she was ironing then put the iron to the spit. She crossed herself again. “I should not have said that.”
Lucy chuckled. “Not a big deal, Grandma.”
“You don’t know what you say,” she whispered savagely.
He decided to ask her once and for all. He’d beat around the bush his whole life and never really asked, but now he felt the impetus to know. Who was this woman who was supposed to eat the souls of the San Pedro dead? Was she real? Was it magic? Or was it more rumor and fearful belief?
He asked her.
Abuela shook her head. She lifted the iron from the cloth and set it aside. She unplugged it and placed it on the counter. “It’s not rumor. She’s real. It’s her body that keeps everything alive.”
“But she’s been dead for twenty or more years.”
“Do you think that matters? Jesus been dead for two thousand years and he has power. Time doesn’t matter.”
She opened a container of rice and pulled out a handful. She carried it to where he sat and used a chair to sit beside him, where she dribbled the rice in a loose circle around both of them. It took a while and Lucy was quiet while she worked. When she finished, she covered her left eye with her right hand to ward off evil spirits. “Her body traps the energies and uses it for the curse.”
“What energies?”
“The souls of the dead. Haven’t you been listening to me, boy?”
“You mean all the stories are true?”
“Of course they’re true, child. Why did you think I’ve been telling them to you all of this time?”
“I thought they were just stories to scare us children.”
“Scare you? If I wanted to scare you I’d have told you about the cops and the welfare and the blacks in South Central. Why should an old dead woman scare you?”
“Come on. You knew we were scared. Sometimes I even thought you enjoyed it.”
Although he could see an echo of mischief in her eyes, she wouldn’t admit it. Instead, she frowned deeply. “I was trying to prepare you. You’re becoming like her. You live and die by this land.”
“But I don’t suck souls.”
“Not yet.” She coughed. “Listen to me. This thing she’s done is out of hand. She needs to be stopped.”
“The Bruja? But what can we do? How do you fight magic?”
“Burn the body, kill the spell.”
“The body? There can’t be much left of it.”
“Oh, you’d be surprised. I remember when I was a child in Tijuana, I saw the body of a woman who’d died when Poncho Villa was still young. She sat in an immense chair in one corner of the parlor wearing a black dress. She looked like she’d stopped living a second ago. Something about the magic kept her body from doing what bodies are supposed to do.”
He wanted to ask her what the woman was doing there and who she was, but this was probably too much. He didn’t know if he could take the answer. Instead, he asked, “Do I have to burn the body?”
“Si. It’s the only way. Fire cleanses and purifies.”
He shook his head as he tried to fit the concept into his way of thinking. Jump the trustees at the halfway house and torch the building? It seemed like overkill.
“Laurie is stuck there. It’s eating her like everyone else.”
“What?”
“And Split, too. I thought you loved him. You want her to eat his soul too?”
“Of course not! What kind of question is that?” He looked at her sharply. “You mean that’s what she’s doing?”
“What have I been telling you? Listen, she needs the energy of the dead to power her life. Everyone, everything that dies here, feeds her.”
“Everyone or just those living here? What about visitors?”
“Aren’t you listening to me? Everyon
e. Every single person who dies here dies forever. They don’t go to Heaven. They don’t go to Hell. Instead, they go to the halfway house to feed her revenge.”
Lucy digested the idea. He’d never been much into church because of the formality of it all, but he did believe in God, the Saints and Mary. He was raised a good Catholic and was able to fit his gang work into the directives of God. As blasphemous as it seemed, he often thought of himself as a gangbanger apostle, following in the footsteps of Christ as he healed and repaired the lives of the city and those within. He didn’t steal from those in need. He didn’t kill those who didn’t deserve to die. He committed sins, but he didn’t feel that they’d made him an irredeemable soul. He expected to be blessed and absolved of his sins so that he could reach Heaven and meet his Lord. But what his abuela said was that not only was he never going to get to Heaven if he died in San Pedro, but no one had for the last fifty years. The concept of all those souls eaten and destroyed was too much to contemplate.
“What kind of woman was she when she was alive? I remember seeing her, but I was so little.”
“She was a fine woman. She was a healer and had a botanica across the street from the halfway house. That place where Mark Nunez is. Everyone went to her when they had an ailment, whether it was for the body or the heart. She even made love potions that people came for from as far away as Las Vegas. The police, the priests, the mayor—everyone respected her and gave her special consideration.”
“Did she get in trouble with the police?”
“Not really. They had issue with some of the ingredients of some of her spells. She dealt with several morticians for grave dirt and small pieces of the dead. She also used coca and went to bed with rosemary.”
Lucy smiled. His abuela had said acostarse con rosemaria, which was an old way to say smoked marijuana and literally meant to go to bed with rosemary, the herb. “How did the priests feel about her?”